Utility meters, such as electrical meters, are typically utilized at residences and businesses to monitor the provision of one or more utility services. Recently, a wide variety of different types of smart meters and advanced meters have been developed to facilitate the collection of additional consumption data and to facilitate various network communications between the meters and other entities, such as a local utility. Smart meters are utilized for a wide variety of purposes, including billing purposes, outage detection, voltage level detection, volt-ampere reactive loss detection, detection of aggregated load on transformers, and submetering of appliance usage.
In electrical power systems, smart meters are typically connected to a single phase within a three-phase electrical power system. In order to utilize data received from a smart meter for various business purposes, the phase to which the meter is connected must often be determined or identified. If the phase utilized in business calculations is incorrect, the results of the calculations may often be incorrect. However, during the installation of meters, the meters are often incorrectly installed or connected on the wrong phase. Additionally, repair crews and repair technicians often disconnect meters during repair and/or maintenance and then reconnect meters to the wrong phase. Further, during overload conditions, a dispatcher may switch a circuit to another substation for load balancing purposes, thereby resulting in certain meters being connected to a different phase. Over time, the business application that utilize meter data often cannot accurately determine or identify which phase various meters are connected to and which phase received meter data is associated with.
Accordingly, a need exists for improved systems, methods, and apparatus for identifying a phase to which a utility meter is connected.